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Balanced instruction cache: reducing conflict misses of direct-mapped caches through balanced subarray accesses
Chuanjun Zhang;
Computer Architecture Letters
Volume 5,
Issue 1,
Jan.-June 2006
Page(s):2
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5
Abstract:
It is observed that the limited memory space of direct-mapped caches is not used in balance therefore incurs extra conflict misses. We propose a novel cache organization of a balanced cache, which balances accesses to cache sets at the granularity of cache subarrays. The key technique of the balanced cache is a programmable subarray decoder through which the mapping of memory reference addresses to cache subarrays can be optimized hence conflict misses of direct-mapped caches can be resolved. The experimental results show that the miss rate of balanced cache is lower than that of the same sized two-way set-associative caches on average and can be as low as that of the same sized four-way set-associative caches for particular applications. Compared with previous techniques, the balanced cache requires only one cycle to access all cache hits and has the same access time as direct-mapped caches.
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